My daily encounters with a couple of town ravens. They live near the playing fields and parks of my town. Madame Dog sadly is no longer with me.
Now that Miss Sophie has come to share my life, it is her, and the other park dogs, which are mentioned forthwith. And, of course, the weather ...

Town Raven

In flight

ITS A DIARY !

This is a diary, or rather, field notes written up each day, with the latest entry at the top.

To get the full story, start at the bottom entry in the archive, and read upwards.

Then read the current diary entries from the bottom up as well.

Once you've got the full story, just visit and read the new story for the day!

Enjoy!

Location Map

This shows where we walk and meet the ravens

The yellow and pink squiggly lines are two walks we take. The yellow one is the one we usually do. The squigglyness indicates how Madame visits her several important sniffing check-points!

We stop several times to feed the ravens, and you can see where they come from.

If you right-click on the image and open it in a new tab, you can then zoom in to see more details.

Saturday, 28 November 2009

More rain overnight, but it stayed dry whilst we were out. Must have been because I wore waterproof trousers ...!

We left earlier than yesterday and got to the little arboretum shortly after 7.30 a.m. It was much lighter than yesterday. The ground was too sodden to walk on, and the trees stood in their own little private lakes. It was rather cold.

The first raven sat under the horse chestnuts at the corner of the ravens field, and looking around for the second, I saw him sit on the top of the derelict Victorian drinking fountain.

We got straight into the ravens field, and with the first scraps I saw that these were the 'young' pair. It is not so much their physical features, its their behaviour which is so different from my first pair.

While they have become less skittish with each time we meet, they are still very wary and don't come closer than three yards unless we turn our backs. Also, they do not make holes as a routine, but rather - or so it looks to me - as an afterthought.

Most interestingly, while one raven does try and get more scraps than the other, he restricts himself to one or two extra scraps, and does not aim to get the whole lot, as my bold one does. He also does not snatch the extra scrap when he sees his companion aiming for it.

We went through the usual routine, and left by the now familiar 'no-more-food'- way. The ravens followed us a bit in the open field, but did not venture onto the patch in front of the sheds. One flew up to sit on one of the small trees at the boundary of the spinney as we made our way along - but that was it.

So it does rather look as if the two pairs have a different schedule according to time/daylight.

We shall confirm this by getting out later tomorrow, still using the walk to the small arboretum.

I hope we can do this - Madame seems to be a bit under the weather this afternoon ...